GSWOC International Student Committee email back up
Apr 28, 2023
Hello Everyone,
I hope you are doing well.
I think it’s a good idea to meet next week to discuss the last bargaining session, finalize the survey, and other topics.
You can see the latest version of the survey here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15iXby-H-yQF8BEvbb_LGfdrVvJjGLh8NjLPQvFzw7VM/edit
Please feel free to add comments and share your feedback.
Please let me know when you are available. I created a when2meet for that:
https://www.when2meet.com/?xxx
Best Regards,
S. B.
May 1, 2023
Dear all,
Based on the availability times, I think we can have our meeting at Tuesday from 2:00 to 3:00 pm. I moved the meeting I had to another time. So, all 11 people are available at that time.
We can use this zoom link for tomorrow’s meeting:
https://usc.zoom.us/j/xxx
Please let me know if you have any comment.
Regards,
S. B.
May 2, 2023
Hi everyone, We have a meeting this afternoon to discuss bargaining, our survey design, story collection, and the next steps. Here is a summary of the meeting:
For the bargaining:
several bargaining team members shared how the bargaining went. People mentioned that based on the impression of USC bargaining team, statistics and anonymous stories may not be enough. Since it was indicated they wouldn’t be so convinced by anonymous stories, we may need to invite people to the bargaining and share their stories. People also discussed USC’s position on an important issue: joint labor management committee, where we and USC share the power to decide working conditions. This kind of committee will exist throughout the whole contract length, which can help us to get continuous improvement even after the bargaining. Bargaining team members mentioned USC is open to this idea.
For the story collection:
Kiana, Sina, and other people will have a meeting tomorrow to discuss it further. We also mentioned we will ask department leaders to help us collect these stories. Further details about the department bargaining structure are in “5/1/23 Steering Agenda”, which can be accessed in this google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bdP41SEdbz1qG7_J2Kz_CGC5EFSIz-8C
For the survey, we discussed several questions in the survey.
Working restriction and working hours:
Laboni and Sulyab mentioned the working hour limitation for international students may be used to leverage USC to prevent us from working overtime. Simon shared that the working restriction prevented him to find a summer job and his department didn’t offer him a summer appointment. We also discussed collecting working hour information in our survey. Our previous workplace environment and compensation survey showed the average graduate student worker at USC spends 36 hours per week on research and teaching
Taxing support:
Laboni mentioned it is legally important for international students to fill the tax correctly, as it can affect visa status, which can be leveraged to push USC to support us better. Simon and other people mentioned that USC is already putting money into taxing software, OIS gives coupon code for taxing software for international students, which is only for federal tax. Simon mentioned at the bargaining table, we can try to redirect the money to other things that can be more helpful, e.g. someone hired by USC to help us filling the tax.
For the survey timeline
People mentioned GSWs may not check their USC email very often during the summer, so it is a good time for us to do the survey as this semester is coming to an end. We will meet very soon to finalize the rest of the survey.
As a closing of this summary, we also discussed the relationship between quantitative data and personal stories. Megan mentioned both are important. Quantitative data can empower other students, as it will demonstrate a huge number of us are feeling the same.
A more detailed meeting note is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WBU4UmTokk1etRDNrlTdchljLzQc9Es7kGxdPT-5aBQ/edit Also, here is the survey draft, feel free to add suggestion: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15iXby-H-yQF8BEvbb_LGfdrVvJjGLh8NjLPQvFzw7VM/edit
Have a good night,
Best, R
May 5, 2023
Hi everyone,
Happy Friday!
I am attaching the international student survey draft here again to gather final comments and feedback from everyone. International Student Worker Survey Updated (Paper Version) - Google Docs
This afternoon, a few of us met via zoom to address all of the comments that we had on the previous iteration of the survey. Thank everyone for your valuable feedback!
Once we can finalize content of the survey, I will create a digital version of the survey using SurveyMonkey. Hopefully, we can finalize everything over the weekend so that both the international student survey and the departmental survey could be distributed early next week.
Best, S. F.
May 8, 2023
Hey all,
Survey looks great! I took a stab at writing it up here using the GSWOC SurveyMonkey account like other union surveys: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PGJDJNN – let me know if folks have any feedback.
We also talked at steering today about tabling the launch of both surveys until next week, since this week seems to be super busy for folks with commencement and all. Does that work for everyone? Let me know if folks have any thoughts.
K. A.
May 9, 2023
Hi K. A.,
Thank you so much for creating the survey on SurveyMonkey!! The survey looks great. The only suggestion I have is to format the “if yes, please describe your experience” as a part of the yes or no questions (shown in the first screenshot below) instead of as separate questions.
Screenshot 2023-05-09 at 10.45.30 AM.png
I did this by selecting the “Add ‘Other’ answer option or Comment Field” option (shown in the second screenshot below).
Screenshot 2023-05-09 at 10.50.42 AM.png
The problem with formatting the questions this way is that the “if yes, describe your experience” would have a smaller font size than the main question.
Best, S. F.
May 9, 2023
Updated! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PGJDJNN
Thanks for the notes – let me know if folks have any other feedback.
Best,
K. A.